Despite the fact that South Carolina hasn’t had a single case of a person contracting Zika within the state (all Zika cases that have turned up in South Carolina were travel-related and brought in from elsewhere), they decided to preemptively dump a poisonous, neurotoxic pesticide called Naled all over everything, killing millions upon millions of bees almost instantly.

Death came suddenly to Dorchester County, S.C. Stressed insects tried to flee their nests, only to surrender in little clumps at hive entrances. The dead worker bees littering the farms suggested that colony collapse disorder was not the culprit — in that odd phenomenon, workers vanish as though raptured, leaving a living queen and young bees behind.

Instead, the dead heaps signaled the killer was less mysterious, but no less devastating. The pattern matched acute pesticide poisoning. By one estimate, at a single apiary — Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply, in Summerville — 46 hives died on the spot, totaling about 2.5 million bees.

Walking through the farm, one Summerville woman wrote on Facebook, was “like visiting a cemetery, pure sadness.”

This time South Carolina didn’t just send sprayer trucks as per the usual. This time, they decided to have the poison dumped on the county from the air (again, even though Zika has never been contracted there). They chose to do it between 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. Sunday… when everyone is getting up to go to church. The planes reportedly passed over three times, dumping a chemical that is well-known to be highly toxic to bees.

Keepers could have covered their bees if they had known this was going to happen. Dorchester County claims it informed residents the spray was coming… with a newspaper announcement and a Facebook post just 45 hours in advance (although homeowners claim they weren’t told until ten hours in advance). Gee, guess the people better hope they either read the local paper daily in 2016 or regularly visit Dorchester County’s Facebook page (“You know, like people always do when they go on Facebook, visit their county’s official Facebook page,” said no one ever).

“Had I known, I would have been camping on the steps doing whatever I had to do screaming, ‘No you can’t do this,’” beekeeper Juanita Stanley said in an interview with Charleston’s WCSC-TV. Stanley told the Charleston Post and Courier that the bees are her income, but she is more devastated by the loss of the bees than her honey.

Stanley said her farm “looks like it’s been nuked.”

Check out the county’s official response to the grisly bee apocalypse it committed:

The county acknowledged the bee deaths Tuesday. “Dorchester County is aware that some beekeepers in the area that was sprayed on Sunday lost their beehives,” Jason Ward, county administrator, said in a news release. He added, according to the Charleston Post and Courier, “I am not pleased that so many bees were killed.”

Most people (who don’t work for Dorchester County as administrators) are smart enough to realize that if it does that to millions upon millions of bees, spraying a carcinogenic neurotoxin that actually causes autismand microcephaly in studies all over everyone from the sky is probably not a very good thing to do to crops, wildlife, livestock, pets, and humans either.

On top of that, it isn’t even a good way to get rid of mosquitoes!! (Not that South Carolina has even had a single case of state-based Zika, just have to mention that fact again.) Studies have actually shown thatNaledincreases adult mosquito populations down the road as it is the least effective method known for combating them! YAY!!:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has written that “adulticiding, application of chemicals to kill adult mosquitoes by ground or aerial applications, is usually the least efficient mosquito control technique.

Naled is no exception. For example, researchers from the New York Department of Health showed that 11 years of naled spraying was “successful in achieving short-term reductions in mosquito abundance, but populations of the disease-carrying mosquito of concern “increased 15-fold over the 11 years of spraying.”

Increased fifteen-fold?? Are they trying to kill potential Zika mosquitoes or BREED them???

Who is really being sprayed for Zika here…?

ABC4 reported, “Now officials are looking into how this happened and whether the spray is too toxic for wildlife.”

NOW? NOW THEY’RE LOOKING INTO IT?!

ಠ_ಠ

Hopefully that county gets sued over this to the point they have to take it out of their poison budget to pay these people back.